What preamp creates the largest soundstage?

Doubtful question.
"Sound stage" comes from the recording, it is not "created" in the pre-amp, power-amp, the interconnects, or the speakers.
Equipment can only reveal or hide what was included in the recording. They cannot magically add what was not there. Close miked multi track overdubbed piece o crap recordings are dime a dozen. Nice acoustic balanced recordings are not that common. Few people ask for or appreciate it.
Don’t forget speaker placement and room treatments for minimizing reflections. Reflections will smear the image if one was there to begin with. 

I will agree but only partialy, yes recording plays huge part in creating soundstage but preamp is egually important. Even best recording from eg chesky records will sound flat, 2d if preamp is not capable of creating holographic, 3d soundstage. I have own preamp from Rotel, Rogue Audio, PrimaLuna, Hegel and currently testing Cyrus. Rotal and Rogue could not create 3d image at all. Primaluna is one of this that acctualy can create soundstage extending beyond and allow speakers to disappear but not at the same level with Hegel or Cyrus. Hegel projects huge, deep, 3d image in all directions, can easily hear sounds to sides of listening position as there were surrounds speakers present, floorstanders complitly disappears leaving only surrounding sound. Cyrus is eqally good but image is moved forward, soundstage is more in front towards the listener and depth shrinks. All this preamp where inserted to exactly same system, cables etc only preamp was changed. Still in quest for preamp, to see what can best hegel p20 and cyrus dac xp with psx-r, both brilliant in this respect. 

I do not think electronics create sound stage. They may be able to harm it but I do not know that for a fact. The job for electronics is to replicate whatever the source is and then perhaps modify it in a very specific way. Some tube electronics give you a sense of more depth which I think is why a lot of us like them but it is a distortion of the truth. The Atmasphere and ARC preamps do not do this. I think the MP 3 is a great choice.
As for as SS preamps go and if you really want to have a wild time with your system and are computer savvy check out the Anthem STR. Anthem is a Canadian company. This preamp has effective room control and great bass management. You will see exactly what your system is doing and learn what changes do to the sound. It is an incredible learning experience and the improvement is sound quality is very noticeable , particularly the imagine. The frequency response of any two speakers is not identical. On top of this they are in different locations in the room which generally separates them even more. I have seen identical speakers vary up to 10 dB at points. This smears the image as whichever speaker is loudest at any given frequency will own that frequency. You literally have part of an instrument coming from the right, part in the middle and part in the left with obvious results. Room control makes the speakers in their locations perfectly identical with obvious results. Then there is digital sub woofer management. There is no better way to easily integrate subwoofers. Not only can you choose cross over points and slopes but the frequency response of the subs is made flat and identical at the listening position and they are perfectly time and phase aligned with the satellites. The subs disappear and all you have is great bass.
This type of device scares the analog guys. IMHO there is no analog preamp that can compete with the Anthem STR or the Trinnov Amethyst a much more expensive unit made in France. I use a TACT 2.2X. TACT unfortunately went out of business years ago due to poor management
and a bad business model for that type of device. Boz (Radomir Bozevic) assumed that his customers were as smart as he was and that everything was obvious, a very bad assumption. He became swamped with customer questions and complaints. His owner manuals were particularly poor. Those of us that had an idea of what we were doing had to learn on the fly. I watched the forum and guess that 50% of the people really had no idea what to do or what they were doing which is understandable given the complexity of the units. The newer Anthem and Trinnov units have been simplified. You can get into the nitty gritty if you so desire but most will not. The Trinnov is usually set up by the dealer. The microphone costs $800 and is an option. With the Anthem you get everything. It is a much better value.

The first step to solving a problem, is admitting you have one ... and you already have done that below :-)


I am pretty confident in the position that electronics do not recreate a soundstage (that probably was not on the recording in the first place), at least intentionally. That comes from timing and levels in the music, and speaker and room interaction including reflections that create a false width to the sound field that while not accurate, is enjoyable to probably most people. No intentionally un-colored preamp should mess enough with phase (and step response) in the audio band to impact timing, nor frequency response, nor have much in the way of THD, IMD or noise.


So I guess the question is, is the new "flat" preamp, more colored, and hence interfering with the natural sound field you have come to enjoy, or is the one you have now more colored. Without figuring that out, I think it will be hard to know what is going to work better for you.

and I will be the first to admit that perhaps the very large soundstage is not “accurate”to real music, but boy is it seductive and I love it and can’t live without it.

The one that’s isolated from the nefarious extremely low frequency vibrations coming up from the floor. 🔝 By the way, all the information you need to obtain a large expanding soundstage is right on the recording - all 3 physical dimensions of the recording space plus the time coordinates. ⏰ The trick is to extract that information from the recording completely and accurately. 🤗

The biggest 3D soundstage comes from directly heated triode [DHT] preamps.Especially if you can use meshplate tubes .Coincident,Ming Da,Manley and Supratek make DHT preamps.I use a Supratek 300B preamp and it has a very big room filling soundstage.The Ming Da DHT preamps are surprisingly good.Not Supratek or Coincident standard but still very good.

Guys are you saying best preamp is no preamp?
In my experience preamp make huge difference in how soundstage is build and if that is because as per mijostyn: "The job for electronics is to replicate whatever the source is and then perhaps modify it in a very specific way. Some tube electronics give you a sense of more depth which I think is why a lot of us like them but it is a distortion of the truth.". Bottom line is preamps are manipulating this holographic effect in one way on another. In regards to tube preamps I have not heard (DTM) mention by jtgofish but IMHO solid state preamps gave me more of that 3d effect then tube. Question is what preamp will produce vastest, deepest stage stage and 3d effect without over exaggeration. Obviously huge part in all our digressions is the room acoustics which nobody is talking about. Same system will sound completely different in every room. Not sure why many of us chasing for perfect sound swapping gear but not adapting rooms acoustically...   

sebs,

See my post above about rooms and speaker room interaction. I think the "Not sure why many of us chasing for perfect sound swapping gear but not adapting rooms acoustically... ", comes from the "throw money at the problem" approach, because it is easy and you feel you have done something, even if you really have not. It is much easier (and often cheaper) than the much harder job of actually fixing the problem.


I gave a talk at a well attended audiophile club meeting. I asked how many people owned a measurement microphone and software, something that can be purchased for $100. Maybe 15% put up their hand, but you know the average system price in that room was well north of $10K, not to mention the value, even un-modified of the room it often dominates.

The biggest 3D soundstage comes from directly heated triode [DHT] preamps.

This statement is false. To get a proper soundstage that is faithful to the input signal, the preamp must have wide bandwidth so there are no phase shift issues in the audio region. To do this the bandwidth must be 10x lower than the lowest frequency to be amplified (2Hz) and 10x the highest frequency to be amplified as well. Because phase shift will only be to 10KHz, you can sort of get away with 100KHz on the top end, 200KHz is better. This insures that all the phase relationships that are vital to the soundstage information are amplified correctly.

There is no "soundstage" below about 80-120Hz.

Real stoundstage is a combination of monaural clues, so not really impacted by phase-shift except perhaps at speaker cross-over frequencies and perhaps room nodes, and differential timing, i.e. the time differential of the same signal between your two ears.  Assuming the phase-shift between the two channels is roughly the same, then phase-shift due to amplification will not have a big impact on perceived real soundstage. Artificial sound-stage effects, can be caused by frequency filtering mainly through the mid-range, i.e. height effects, and distortions, noise, etc. that can give an impression of "space" that was not on the recording.

There is no "soundstage" below about 80-120Hz.

This is true. But if the low frequency cutoff of the amplification is only 20Hz, phase shift will exist up to 200Hz. Admittedly, not a lot going on there either. But the phase shift can affect impact of bass notes so its worth getting that bit right as well.

Heaudio123, I do measure but found that friends in same hobby do not understand graphs, waterfalls in eg REW. Furthermore, once all setup is done mic etc would not be used untill any change to the setup. So firstly lack of knowledge and secondly waste of money for them.
I found aswell that propaly integrated sub add another layer to the sound stage, you are able to sense/know in what kind of space recording took place. Since I move to new home few years ago I start having huge issue in 30hz range and no reasonable bass trap or listening position move could solve it, I start using peq upto 100hz range and difference is staggering, tight, quick, controlled lowest octaves. But as will everything some people would argue that manipulation in signal degrades it, I would say that even if it does, the positive change in overall system sound by eq bass overwhelm potential losses. 

DHT preamps produce the most 3D /holographic soundstage.Probably because those same tubes do the same thing when used in power amps.Which is why so many people love SET amplifiers.Except you are better off getting those qualities in your preamp and using any type of power amp that lets those qualities through because SET amplifiers are incredibly speaker fussy.Plus a really good DHT preamp will cost you a lot less than a really good SET power amplifier.

I have found my Coincident CSL using the Psvane WE replica 101D tubes to be wonderful with respect to spacial presentation.  

DHT preamps produce the most 3D /holographic soundstage.Probably because those same tubes do the same thing when used in power amps.

This statement is entirely false. Soundstage is not created by how the filament interacts with the input signal! And we can also show easily enough that SETs don't rule the roost when it comes to creating a 3D soundstage.


To get the soundstage right, the circuit has to have bandwidth such that phase shift does not exist in the essential regions where it makes the most difference to the human ear. For the most part this is the Fletcher-Munson  curve frequencies, about 3-7KHz. If the preamp lacks bandwidth past 30KHz its not going to get this right.


So a DHT preamp would only work if its bandwidth met this criteria. It would be doing this because of bandwidth and low distortion, not due to the DHT.


I recommend to anyone that is interested in getting to the bottom of this sort of thing to get a decent set of microphones and a good studio quality recorder. Go out and make a good, 2-mic recording that you can stand to listen to over and over- and then produce it on LP and a digital format. In the case of LP you don't have to produce 500 copies or the like; a test LP is fine. Now you'll have a real reference- because you were there at the recording session and you have the master tapes or master file.

The "make your own reference recording" is a great idea and easily done. Outside of DSP or some effect, I think the soundstage comes from the recording. I do not want any component "blocking" the recording’s soundstage in any form. Or any room obstacles as well. I find even great mono recordings can have a wide soundstage.

Ralph, would monoblock versions of a stereo amp have any improvement of the soundstage?

Ralph, would monoblock versions of a stereo amp have any improvement of the soundstage?

They often do because there is less crosstalk.

If DHT preamps are not the best at creating 3D soundstage why would manufacturers use them? Perhaps they are just stupid? DHTs are a lot more difficult to use than dedicated preamp valves.It also seems odd that for those that have worked out how to make them they become their premium model .The Coincident mentioned above by Brownsfan is a DHT preamp [101D].

Ditto on Atma-Sphere, VAC...add in Joule Electra.

If DHT preamps are not the best at creating 3D soundstage why would manufacturers use them? Perhaps they are just stupid?

They're not stupid. A good designer can work to achieve the goals that a preamp has to provide in a number of different ways. Its not hard to build a DHT-based preamp, and one of the advantages is that the tube doesn't have a lot of gain, which works nicely with digital sources. All you have to do though is to be sure you get the *bandwidth*; keeping the distortion down isn't that hard with almost any triode, DHT or not.


The designer might like the linearity curve, he also might realize that to set his preamp design apart from others he has to do something different and using DHTs is a good example of that. When we introduced our preamp (the MP-1) it was the world's first balanced line preamp for home audio; we did that as there are so many advantages of operating balanced (as long as the balanced standard is supported), but also for the simple fact that in 1989 when we did this, placing yet another single-ended preamp on the vast heap of such preamps available at the time was done at one's own peril. Another way to put this is 'marketing' :)


Now as to DHTs in general, most of them are used in SETs. SETs have many disadvantages, but one advantage they do have is that as power is decreased the distortion becomes unmeasurable. If you have a speaker with great enough efficiency to take advantage of this, you can show off that 'inner detail' for which so many of them are known. With most push-pull (not all) amps as power is decreased there is a certain point (generally about 5-7% of full power) where distortion reaches its minimum and then goes back up! So SETs can have a very musical presentation especially if you have a high efficiency loudspeaker.


Its one way to get there, but by no means the only way. We make OTLs that **also** have the same quality of distortion decreasing to unmeasurable as power as decreased. They are also triode and no feedback, and have that relaxed organic quality SETs are know for, but with power, speed, detail and bandwidth that SETs are not. And that's just one example... the bottom line is no matter what, engineering has to be the over-arching principle, that and the understanding of how the ear perceives sound.